Expenditures on prescription drugs are one of the fastest growing components of national health care spending, rising by almost three-fold between 1995 and 2007. Coinciding with this growth in prescription drug expenditures has been a rapid rise in direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), made...

The purpose of this study is to estimate the effect of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs on prescription drug prices and sales. Major increases in broadcast DTCA began in August 1997 when the FDA eliminated the requirement that broadcast advertising present all of the...

In May 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Rhode Island's ban on advertising prices of alcoholic beverages, making Rhode Island the subject of a natural experiment for measuring the impact of advertising on prices. Using Massachusetts prices as controls, we find that while advertising stores...